You gotta love Brits with a sense of humor: Bespoke Road Rallies, which organizes serious events for classic cars around the world, has announced plans to exit the EU in style next year — The Great British Brexit Rally 2019.
Though designed for the British to bid farewell to what have been their fellow members of the European Union, the Brexit Rally will be a navigation fun run that will penalize speeding, and likely any other un-neighborly behavior, but will award as much as £25,000 ($35,000) to the car that drives the fewest miles while visiting all EU members (except the islands of Malta and Cyprus) over the course of 22 days.
Cars will carry GPS trackers and each car’s occupants are to post their day’s activities and encounters on social media in hopes of gaining “Spirit of the Event” points. There also will be a team competition should three cars choose to link their efforts.
The rally begins March 8, 2019, in Brussels and ends March 29 — England’s last day as an EU member — in Parliament Square, London.
“Brexit negotiations have sometimes been anything but harmonious, and our intention is for this fun event to return a degree of entente cordial to the relationship between Britain and the EU, while delivering a truly unique and memorable driving experience,” event organizer John Brigden is quoted in the Bespoke news release.
Copperstate’s field of dreams is Sunday
The 28th annual Copperstate 1000 vintage sports car rally launches Sunday morning from Diablo Stadium in Tempe, Arizona. Each year, dozens of vintage vehicles tour Arizona highways and byways on a multi-day rally that raises money for the Phoenix Art Museum and for the support of injured state troopers and their families.
For many years, the event has launched from the spring training home of the California Angels baseball team, with a car-club cruise-in in the parking lot and with the Copperstate contingent arrayed around the baseball field, thus turning it into a true “field of dreams” for collector car enthusiasts.
Prescott hill climb celebrates 80th anniversary
The Bugatti Owner’s Club was founded in 1929 and began staging hillclimb races in southern England in 1931. Five years — and no doubt many terrorized communities — later, the club realized it needed its own venue and acquired the Prescott House and Estate in the “Cotswold Hills” near Cheltenham, about 100 miles northwest of London.
The first Prescott Hill Climb was held April 10, 1938, and the facility celebrates its 80th anniversary with a two-day event May 26-27 with classes not only for Bugattis, including the Chiron, but those for British, French and Italian marques, and with special demonstration runs, including that of the 1911 Fiat S76 “Beast of Turin.”
If you can’t wait that long to see cars race up the Prescott hill, the British and Midland hill climb championship season opens April 28-29 and will include not only four-wheeled racers but motorcycles, both solo and with sidecars.
